Jim Morgan and the King of Thieves by James Matlack Raney Page B

that there was even a small chance of regaining his box and setting his life straight once again.

THIRTEEN

    fter tossing and turning through one of the most miserable nights of sleep in the history of sleeping, Jim opened his eyes to a gray London morning. The only pillow he had been able to find had been a hard, flat brick, and his only blanket had been a dingy old coat one of the Ratts let him borrow. But worst of all, a nightmare had plagued Jim’s dreams, of Aunt Margarita, old Count Cromier, and that horrible Bartholomew with coal black hair and ice blue eyes, all chasing him through the haunted forest and down the streets of London. But no matter how fast or how far Jim went, the villains were forever but a few footsteps behind, and just before he awoke, when the dream could surely grow no darker, the shadowy cloaked man, raven perched atop his shoulder, appeared to block Jim’s last hopes of escape.
    Jim lay awake with his head on the brick for a few moments, trying to forget his dream by recounting the previous days horrors instead: having been robbed, beaten up, mocked, held at the mercy of the King of Thieves, and press-ganged into a troupe of pickpockets called, of all things, the Brothers Ratt. But worse than all that, Jim knew that by losing his box the night before, he had lost the only means of making all of this mess right again.
    Finally Jim hobbled to his feet, twisted to pop his back and neck back into proper position, and took a look around. As it turned out, the Ratts lived in an abandoned cellar beneath a shoe factory with a hole in the wall that acted as the only window and only door to their “house.” Although, Jim noted, as far as homes made out of abandoned cellars beneath shoe factories went, this one was only half awful. Its occupants had managed to steal enough odds and ends to give the place a sense of homeliness.
    A wooden coat rack leaned crookedly by the hole, the Ratts’ stolen caps and scarves hanging haphazardly from its hooks, and a small set of empty drawers sat nearly collapsed against the far wall. Beside the chest of drawers a rickety shelf barely stood on its wobbly legs beneath a load of stolen books the children couldn’t read. On the top shelf sat a row of various soldiers’ hats stolen off various soldiers’ heads, and on a small, plain table in the middle of the room stood a cracked vase, containing a few flowers with broken stalks and only a few sickly petals. As for bedding, the Ratts had piled bunches of burlap potato sacks in the corners of the room, one for each of the brothers and Lacey – though each of Jim’s new friends had been decent enough to loan him one sack from each of their own piles to make him a bed beside the chest of drawers.
    “It didn’t always look this fantastic, Jim,” George said, popping out of bed, a seemingly everlasting smile stretched across his small face. “Believe you me, before Lacey came along, this place was a real dump!”
    “I can only imagine,” Jim said.
    “Yes, sir!” George exclaimed. “She made us sweep up and even got Paul to talk an old florist into lending us that vase with the flowers,if you catch my drift…don’t go back to that corner much anymore though, he was a fast blighter for a florist. A woman’s touch, Jim, that’s all the old home front needed, a woman’s touch! And now look at it!”
    “Home sweet home, eh?” Jim tried to force a smile, turning away before his true feelings about the cellar accidentally escaped, as he needed these Ratts help to retrieve his box.
    “Yep,” George said. “A man’s home is his castle as long as he’s the king of it, that’s what our Pa always used to say.”
    “You didn’t know our father, George,” Peter said from the pile of sacks that was his bed, stretching and yawning himself awake.
    “Or our mother, for that matter,” Paul added, wiping away the sleepy goobers from his eyes.
    “True,” George said with a nod, still smiling. “But that